A Poem A Day, Day Thirty, Last Day

With This I Bid Good-bye to APAD!The Four Elements of a Marriage that Ended, with Pictures.

1. Water

I enjoyed having you photograph me
at the lake.
I loved watching your hands
twisting morsels
round and round the hook.
I loved how the boat shook
when you cast out your line,
I loved the lead tear
that sank to the depths.
I loved all of it.
I loved you but not what was to follow.

You should have tossed me back when you had the chance.
I shouldn’t have taken the hook the way I did.

2. Fire

In the picture we are standing in front of the house we called “ours”.
We hung lace-like dreams around the windows.
The floors and all the surfaces we covered with the bludgeoned bodies of our arguments.
We burnt the evidence every morning, (but not the coffee).
We rose like Phoenixes to go off to our work-a-day places,
No one can tell from the picture what went on.
It’s really none of their business.

3.Earth

We have all our the pictures in a leather-bound book.
All of them have captions like:
“This is a picture of us in 1945.”
It will be filled with impossible stories that
are misleading and not very useful,
like history without the architecture.
“We won the war and divided the spoils equally. We are very happy with the outcome.”

4.Air

Take my photograph and sell it to the latest Rag.
I have woken and found a silver thread running through my body connecting me to outer space;
in truth, I have lost everything, but I am totally free.
Everything is illuminated and in brilliant colour.
I am a entirely without substance and yet I am everywhere
and
I forgive everyone eternally,
even you.
Keep in touch via Facebook
You can see pictures of the grandkids.
“Smiley face”

My last and most personal poem! But this isn’t really about me or my marriage except in the way, perhaps, one might define the eras in a long term relationship without really saying anything. It really is talking about previous generations who almost never said anything in any way but allegory. I feel like the new media is turning us all into characters that need to be defined neatly and quickly for the sake of reference and not for any sort of understanding. Avoiding the labels that would be damning turns it all into a collection of snaps or elements, still I guess I prefer a good glossing over… 🙂